Comic 732 - The Lost Spell of Baron Fontainebleu, Page 14

Author Notes:

Okay, at this point I was genuinely getting overwhelmed by just how many people with different agendas and relationships were in the comic. Like, I as a writer was feeling like I'd bitten off more than I could chew with this idea. There's so much going on I was losing track, and I underestimated just how many of these characters only have any weight if you read Wright As Rayne. I think the last two crossovers work without having read it, but here I think you'd be kinda lost. Especially since I really CLEARLY had more in mind for what the guest-stars would say to each other than I did what they'd say to the kids.

As such, I'm reminded why I dislike those huge Crisis Crossover-style events in comics with buttloads upon buttloads of characters; they tend to have so many that there's no real personal stakes in anything and you're not too invested in what's going on. Don't get me wrong, I know a few that avoid that problem (JLA: World War III is one of my favorite comics ever) but on the whole that tends to be an issue.

And it's illustrated greatly here; there's already a ton of stuff I wanna go into and I'm not sure how it'll go up. We can see that Martina met Sareena at one point, and that she has a less-than-stellar reputation among the magical community. In another chapter I'd devote two pages to this stuff and here it's not even mentioned.

Grant's realizing slowly that Martina is getting consistently stronger every time she shows up. Here we see the opposite end of that; getting consistently stronger means that in earlier appearances she was weaker. Alex at one point in WaR (or BP, I forget) mentioned having fought Martina and easily drove her out of town, and kinda running with the idea that she was a good deal weaker in that fight than when she fight met the Blues kids. Hell, if Martina shows up in a flashback at some point, we'll probably just make her an outright Joke Villain.

Okay, round two of my comments because Comic Fury decided to glitch out on round one...

Really I can't claim to so much mind how WaR-centric this crossover's kind of been myself, since it was kind of pushed to the sidelines for the previous two crossovers and not seen much fallout from them - will say that at least one aspect of this crossover will be coming up within the next WaR chapter and figuring into it a bit, which I'm pretty happy with.

Still, I can definitely relate on how it feels when something is just being pushed to the side by circumstance in writing something and it kind of causes you to feel overwhelmed or just disconnected from an idea, that's pretty much what happened with the big frenzied brawl in Shopping Star in WaR. Kind of ended up being more complicated than I thought it would be so I just sort of wound up losing interest in that leg of the plot and phoning it in, which I kind of regret.

Still, I am pretty happy with how this page came out - some good back and forth and I do at least think the kids' comments on the situation are kind of funny. Hopefully everybody enjoys that aspect at least, and that Martina's at least getting something of a spotlight.

Speaking of Martina though, I actually kind of want to try a flashback chapter centered around her at some point or something. I dunno if Adam really wants to do anything of the sort himself, but I feel like we could probably get some good material out of it and she is a character we have a lot in mind for. If nothing else you can probably gather from context here that when she and Sareena met it was when Sareena was very young.

Also, hey, the other members of the Witching Hour! Yeah, those two guys with Kadaram and Tahstia were shown off previously in filler (and one of them was namedropped) but this is their first actual in-story appearance. The thing with that is they had been planned to show up in WaR eventually for awhile, and eventually it was decided to work them into this chapter and part of why Kadaram went ahead and appeared in the last couple WaR chapters was to go ahead and lay the groundwork for them being established a little bit first.

Although really I think the kids being kind of pushed aside like this is pretty appropriate to the current storyline. They've been doing a lot of having to try and prove themselves lately and been faced with doubts in the process, being surrounded by a bunch of adults who essentially ignore them or dismiss them to instead deal with issues relating to each other fits the current arc well.

Martina is Final Boss Martina now! Back then she was probably like “Sub-boss”. First time she fought the kids she was a “Typically boss”, then like a “Returned Boss who has powered up to new levels”. Now Final Boss...I await to see her transition to the ungodly “Secret Boss who makes the fina Boss look like a punk” level.